Willow Smith Previews New Album ‘Lately I Feel Everything’ With ‘Lipstick’

Willow Smith’s new album Lately I Feel Everything will be out on July 16th, the singer announced on Friday. She also shared her latest single from the album, “Lipstick,” a heavy metal-inspired ode to freedom of expression.

“I just wanted to let loose with this album,” Smith said in a statement. “I wanted to have fun and be young and not be so existential and worrying all the time.”

“Lipstick” follows Smith’s previous single “Transparent Soul,” featuring Travis Barker, which also took a more rock-oriented route than her previous music releases. Recorded during the pandemic, Lately I Feel Everything is largely inspired by pop-punk acts like Avril Lavigne, My Chemical Romance, and Paramore, as well as Smith’s early memories of going on tour alongside her mother Jada Pinkett Smith’s metal band, Wicked Wisdom.

“That was my first real tour experience, and that was the first music that I was surrounded by as a child,” she told Rolling Stone. “When I first started doing my own music and my parents got me a vocal coach, we only did pop and R&B kind of vibes, and so for my entire life, I didn’t think I had the voice to sing this kind of music or sing rock in general.”

During quarantine, Smith decided to move in a new creative direction, thanks to the pop-punk bands she had loved as a preteen. “[W]hen Covid hit and quarantine started, I just kind of needed something new — everything was slowing down, and I wanted to try something that I had never tried before.”